NiTiPlant

Our solution uses the heat expansive metal Nitinol to produce energy that is sustainable and available for everyone, especially underprivileged regions of the nation as well as LDCs.

Gaining access to power is a big hardship for underprivileged communities as well as LDCs. We have been trying to solve this problem for many years using renewable energies which are not a viable source as they are expensive to maintain and are not sustainable in the long term due to the construction costs. NiTiPlant relies on heat expansive technology, in terms of a metal called Nitinol, which will create rotational force when one side is in a warmer environment than the other. This torque will be turned into electrical energy with dynamos. This system will not be using any excess energy, as it will be relying on outside heat. It will also be applicable to LDCs in geographic locations such as Africa and the Middle East. The system will be interconnected with a monitoring system that will transmit data about the heat, moisture and the produced energy in the system in order to ensure the system will work flawlessly. To produce 1 MW for both system, the NiTiPlant will be able to pay for itself in a shorter period of time compared to solar panels. For maximum efficiency the system will change its angle to receive maximum solar energy.

Having reliable access to energy should not be a hardship in the 21st century. Aligned with UN's 7th goal for access to clean and reliable energy, NiTiPlant focuses on bringing everyone the reliable and nearly no carbon emission energy they deserve, with the focus on LDCs and underprivileged communities. In our community, when people are in need of energy –due to high costs- they tend to illegally steal from the grid, risking their lives and harming the economy. This problem can be seen very common, as in the south eastern of Turkey, nearly 70% of the population use illegal electricity and this risky procedure resulted in more than 150 deaths last year. Moreover, to produce cheap energy, fossil fuels are preferred and nearly 93% of the used energy comes from fossil fuels in Turkey. Unfortunately, this had very destructive effects such as the drought of important lakes: Karatas Lake, Burdur Lake, Akgöl Lake and harmed the ecosystem and marine life. Also, solar panels aren’t commonly accessible as they are expensive to buy and maintain. It’s also observed that the light reflected from the solar panels have caused the migrant birds passing through Turkey lose their ways and end up dead.

Our solution serves the underprivileged communities that are in need of energy to produce heat and light. These communities such as Mardin, Şırnak and Hakkari in Turkey use 75%, 70% and 65% of their electricity stolen from the grid, which does not only decrease the reliability and the efficiency of the infrastructure, it creates emergency hazards for those communities which has had deadly consequences in the past years. According to UN statistics the usage of fossil fuels increase as the poverty level of a country increase, as they will have no budget left to use for sustainable growth and energy due to their high maintenance costs. Our solution is much more efficient compared to solar panels with low maintenance costs. The need for building, transporting and technical infrastructure will be reduced as the only material needed is NiTinol which is light to import into the country. With our system underprivileged communities will not need to put themselves in danger with stolen energy, the infrastructure will remain intact with it not being stolen and LDCs will be able to access clean energy. In terms of energy efficiency our system will require only $688.000 to produce 1MW of energy while solar panels will require $1.000.000. Our system will prevent the damage to migrating bird species that solar panels cause with their reflective light. The reflected rays tend to increase the green house gases in the atmosphere which is also preventable with our system.

Our team members have been active volunteers before and during this competition. As active leaders of our schools social volunteering club, ConnecTED, we have had many opportunities to engage with underprivileged communities. One example would be the underprivileged schools that are in collabration with our school. We also have been engaged with the foundation YGA (Young Guru Academy) that is utilizing the help of volunteers to engage and teach STEM to underprivileged schools. With the interviews of kids and parents that are living in villages where energy production is reliant on fossil fuels, we have deduced that the major problems are heating and its usage as fuel in farming devices. Our project, the NiTiPlant aims to solve all of them as the generated energy can be converted to heat as well as its possible applications in powering farming vehicles. We used their experiences, surveys and interviews to deduce problems and find possible solutions. Our team members have also had experience in internship work for clean energy companies such as "TYT(Temiz Yenilenebilir Teknolojiler[Clean Sustainable Technologies])" that is focused on the exact same problem that we are targeting now. In this internship experience we have had the chance to inspect and review technologies such as solar, hydrosolar and interview with the engineers to see their lacking points. 

We have currently created the required 3D designs for the NiTiPlant as well as its first prototype which has been successfully used in production of energy. The web server software has also been designed and deployed to the web successfully, which allows us to monitor the required data such as energy produced to ensure it's efficient. The preparation for deploying the system near an underprivileged school as well as a collaborating company "MDH MAKEL INC." is underway and planned in the next 3 weeks. 

The core technology in our solution is SMA (shape memory alloy) technology. Shape memory alloys are specific configurations of metal alloys in which when it is deformed below it’s transition temperature it will regain it’s shape when it is heated to it’s transition temperature. With the help of SMA material NiTi heat engines converting low grade thermal energy to mechanical work can be created. Via this technology our team has created it’s own heat engine (NiTiPlant) design and configured it for harvesting of solar energy. Other present technologies such as dc-dynamo motors converting mechanical rotational energy to electricity and electricity storage technologies like Lithium Ion and Lithium Polymer batteries were also used in the heat engine converting the solar radiation energy to electrochemical energy. Additionally for the Monitir we used internet connectable hardware(esp32) with additional sensors measuring the electric current NiTiPlants are creating and environmental conditions such as humidity, temperature(dht22) and intensity of light(LDR). Also, webservers were used to output the measured values in the NiTiPlant farm so that customers will be able to stay connected with their farms all the time.

Our first plan of action is to utilize the NiTinol Plants for the heat needs of 5.000 people by deploying a pilot product. Our main aim is to satisfy the need of 1/4 of the rural population in Hakkari as this is the main state in Turkey which is currently under hazardous conditions due to illegal grid usage. After the successful deployment of these products in Hakkari, we will continue aiming for the rural population in Turkey as a whole. In order to achieve maximum usage, we will be in the process of collaborating with the Turkish government and NGOs. After the deployment in Turkey has put value on the lives of underprivileged communities, we will be opening up to the international space, where LDCs can utilize our technology to provide for their energy needs in geographic locations such as Africa and the Middle East, which already has a high heat yield, thus making the deployment of our product much easier. At our first year of being international in previously stated geographical locations we will aim out to help at least 0.5% of the 12% Africans living in rural tribes without access to clean energy.

We want to make sure that we reduce the illegal usage of the grid from the energy in Hakkari from %75 to %50. With this we aim to decrease the electrical hazard that is applied on the users of this illegal energy. This will have a drastic effect on decreasing the rate of people being killed because of electricity hazards due to the faulty grid. We aim to develop the software of our technology enough where it is at a point to be used as a proper monitoring tool not only on single NiTinol system but as a tool in entire plants. In the past 60 years 70 lakes have dried out in Turkey with the increasing greenhouse emissions, therefore we want to provide an affordable source as an alternative to solar energy which can be utilized in Turkey to reduce the devastating effect greenhouse gases have on the environment. Our system will be more affordable, efficient and environmentally friendly compared to solar panels. With its energy yield being higher, its maintenance, transportation and production cost being lower, hence giving an initiative for governments to switch to renewable energy and it not reflecting any solar rays, unlike the solar panels, hence not damaging the environment are the brief positive effects our system will provide to our communities and the world.

For any startup to be successful, its effects and impact should be open to measure and as a team we are highly aware of this fact. Therefore, both for our business plan and our growth plan we have set ourselves goals that can be measured. First of all, our aim is to decrease the illegal usage of electricity. This is measured as 75% in Hakkari (The most electricity theft in Turkey) by TUIK (Turkish Statistical Institute.) Our aim for the first year of deployment of our systems is to decrease this percentage to 50% and in 5 years to only 10%. This is calculated by the total population using electricity divided by the population that doesn’t pay for the cost of electricity and energy. Another aim of our startup is to ensure that our systems work efficient enough to cover its own cost so its favorable by people and the government. It roughly takes 4-6 years depending on where you are for our systems to make up its cost, and in 3 years we plan to decrease it to 3-4 years with advancing our technology. Additionally, we aimed to decrease the greenhouse gas emissions with our systems as we don’t reflect any solar rays like solar panels. Roughly, every 2 years a lake dries out in Turkey, and with replacing fossil fuels and solar panels, we aim to increase this to 10 years when our systems are applied throughout Turkey.

Our main issues are financial, technical and political. We firstly need to do more Research and development in both the hardware and software side of our project. The hardware side will be mainly focused on developing the system to be more efficient with data about the best angles to provide heat to the system being collected and used to make the system be more powerful in both natural high heat yield environments and low heat yield environments. We will also focus on making our hardware cheaper and easier to use for it to be more accessible. The next improvement point will be software, we aim to make a perfect and well-optimized software for accurate data collection. The barriers in front of our technical side is budget, as we need a higher research and prototyping budget and mentoring for material science. We also need political help if we want to make our system more available to the regions previously mentioned. In order for it to happen, we need people with influence supporting our project. The barrier for that would be the culture that Turkey has which isn't directed towards development and is more directed towards a stalemate in technology. 

We are all members of the FRC team TED Robotics and are skilled in many areas from electronics to materials science to software developing. We have been working together on different projects for approximately 11 months. 3 of our core members are especially very developed in software developing and artificial intelligence, also know many programming languages from Python to Java.  We also have many core and part time members who know 3D CAD design software like Fusion 360 and can do many simulations in them. Also one of our part time members is a metallurgy student and helps us when we are doing numerical and thermal simulations of our design and is experienced in additive manufacturing. All of these skills that we have mentioned were very crucial in our development because thanks to them we can always implement new aspects to our project like MoNiTir control panel etc. Some of our members have done data clustering researches upon effects of climate change on marine life which is the problem we are trying to address with this solution. We are also in contact with many professors from universities and have earned a lot of experience from our conversations with them.